Negligent Supervision Lawsuit Filed For 13 Year-Old Whose Fingers Were Amputated in Woodworking Class

If you were looking for yet another paradigm of negligent supervision in a school setting, you may want to consider the following scenario which is currently playing out in the California courts:

A 13 year-old middle school student is engaged in a woodworking class. Unfortunately, albeit predictably, he doesn't fully understand the dangers inherent in using the power tools in this class. One of the tools that was being used in this class was a jointer, which is a power tool that has a rotating cutter whose purpose is to straighten out the edges of a wooden board.

But rather than closely supervise these students while they worked with these tools, the woodworking teacher was in his own office, apparently busy selling candy to other students in order to raise money to send his own child to college.

The consequence of this teacher's actions were likewise predictable: this student lost two of his fingers. Permanently.